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I just spent 20 minutes looking for the tray to my printer. How, you ask, does one lose a printer tray?  Well, it is detachable so at least in that respect, it could be removed from the vicinity of the printer (a prank perhaps or theft?)  But let’s be real, that’s weird thing to steal.

Nothing in my office has any intrinsic value except maybe the computer itself. I have a shelf full of college guides from the last few years, so maybe you could argue the 2009 editions would tempt a college-bound would be thief who never heard of the internet and really needed to do a college search to save $40 on buying the books himself.  The computer, sure, is brand new and spiffy.  The printer, however, is not.  It’s about, let’s see, 3 years old?  Maybe 4.  The fact that it still prints and I can still find ink replacement cartridges for it and still have the installation disc is actually kind of amazing.

But the printer is still on my desk. In fact, it was plugged in to the outlet and the computer by the tech guy when he swapped out the old computer for the new one.  Maybe the tray detached when they installed the new desktop and it fell behind the desk. I’ll check.

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Um, no.  The install guys might have taken the tray with them, either as a joke or simply an act of malice but I don’t put a lot of stock in that theory.  But if no one physically took the tray out of my office, I can reasonably conclude two things. 1) It’s still here. 2) I was the culprit that misplaced it.

Could I have somehow removed the tray and set it down somewhere so foreign that I wouldn’t run across it in the course of my work day and now not remember having done so, I’m not able to find it again?  I’m not the kind of guy that loses things permanently (except my mind) but I am the kind of guy who sets things down and can’t find them for hours and in some instances, overnight.  Take my eyeglasses.  If I don’t put them in a routine spot (on the kitchen table, next to the cd player, on the coffee table or next to the bed) I will wander around the apartment for an hour or more wondering what the hell I did with my glasses.  I’ll pass by my shelf of DVDs and decide to alphabetize them or organize by color on the spine. Then remember that I can’t see anything and start trolling for my glasses again until I eventually find them in the kitchen next to a pan I was washing the night before when a huge splash of dirty dish water hit my face and I took off my glasses to wipe myself down and…

I also misplace my keys a lot (house and car), and my chapstick and occasionally my wallet. Not lost, just tucked away for safekeeping somewhere where I would never think to look and had no business putting it there to begin with.

Come to think of it, a pattern is beginning to emerge. I do pretty routinely misplace my phone.  So far, I always find it.  My friends, who know I don’t answer the phone on a good day, don’t even bat an eye when I tell them I it’s gone missing again. It’s usually on the passenger seat of my car or in my desk drawer at work, or occasionally I leave it inside the lunch bag which may or may not come home from work with me on any given day.

I will now go inch by inch over my office looking for the damn tray.

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I’m such a fucktard.  I found it. Fine, crisis over. It wasn’t next to the printer in fact, but sitting on a shelf in the closet behind me underneath a stack of tissue paper we used to wrap our graduating students’ gifts last May.  I was probably shuffling things around my desk during the computer swap and somehow, never reunited the printer with its tray. So it wasn’t theft after all.

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